Behind Blue Eyes
By ~Silk
Part 1
"That wasn't so
hard now, was it?"
Michael glared at the
Head of Section One. Operations had never been one of
his favorite people, but
what he was doing now strained the bounds of the
purely practical working
relationship forged between the two men.
It wasn't that Michael
was surprised to find himself in the White Room.
Again. Operations was a
fairly easy read when it came to predicting what he
would do. He was heavily
invested in power plays and mind fucks...and yes,
he *would* use anything
and everything against a target.
But Michael was no
target.
Or he hadn't been.
Until the anthropologist
came to Section. Blair Sandburg. Short, cheerful,
animated Blair Sandburg.
Not at all the type of man Section usually
concerned itself with.
Targets were invariably one of two types. Either they
were dull gray, crafted
and cloaked for concealment. Or they were bright,
heartstopping red, meant
to be taken seriously at all times.
But Sandburg was
different. His doctoral dissertation just published,
Sandburg epitomized the
social scientist. Ceaselessly curious, he could not
help but ask questions.
And in this case, those questions hypothesized
the
existence of Sentinels.
A Sentinel was something of a behavioral throwback
even as it was something
too cutting-edge to exist in the current world.
What a paradox. On the
outside, Sandburg became a pariah, initially for
espousing views that
sounded so outlandish, it didn't matter whether or not
they could be proven,
later for denigrating his own work as that of a
charlatan. Decried as a
fraud, living like an outlaw, Sandburg had no idea
that anyone would be
interested in what was left of that work.
Inside that alternate
reality called Section One, however, Sandburg was
treated like visiting
royalty. Though he was in fact denied the right to
call himself Doctor,
Sandburg could not help but be intrigued by Section's
tendency to overlook
that detail. Hell, the truth was, he was positively
fascinated by the closed
society that Section represented. Why, the
operative hierarchy
alone would be worth a lifetime of study.
But fascination or not,
Sandburg eventually realized just how dangerous
Section was. This was no
trip down the Amazon. There were no friendly
natives. But there
*were* cannibals. They even had their own language. And
the word
"loyalty" was not in their vocabulary.
Which, in a way, was how
Michael ended up in the White Room.